“A Society of Our Own”: Methodists, Coeducation and the Founding of P.E.O.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In early 1869, on a college campus in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, a new secret society was born. While the group made themselves known in their community, the meetings remained veiled in mystery. Members would set out from their home well ahead of meeting time and walk in the opposite direction from where they wanted to go, trying to evade anyone who might be watching. Sometimes they made several stops along their route, or took back roads which were unnecessary under normal circumstances.1 All of this was done in an effort to maintain the secrecy of their society’s meetings. Perhaps this seems unremarkable in the context of history—even if intriguing—as men participated in secret societies long before the 1860s. However, this society was of a new breed. It was formed exclusively by women and was one of the first of its kind. P.E.O.2, as the society called itself, was founded on January 21, 1869, by seven women at Iowa Wesleyan University. It is the second oldest women’s society which has remained in continuous existence in America.3 Today the society boasts a quarter million members in the United States and Canada.4 However, P.E.O. remains almost entirely out of scholarly conversation, with the exception being in the form of brief mention in sweeping studies of secret societies and fraternalism in the United States.5 There is no doubt this has something to do with the secrecy surrounding the group. Still, in recent decades P.E.O. International has made an effort to make itself more transparent and visible in the world while maintaining the private nature of their
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.070 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".